Sites whining about ad-blockers. Cry me a river.

Occasionally I visit the “tech” website tweakers.net. Mostly through links, but sometimes just to see what nonsense the editors and the community are whining about this time. Aptly named, for it is seemingly run by a random collection of crystal-meth addicts, this dutch tech site has been popular in the tech scene in the Netherlands for years. Now sensible people understand that popularity does not equate quality and this certainly is the case with this site. Poor and biased reporting, generally a payed lip-service site to the highest bidder, a North Korean mentality like community and not worthy of the label “news”.

Media that cater to the lowest common denominator often are very popular and in this sense, tweakers.net is the equivalent of a right-wing populist propaganda site of which you probably can cite many. Not worth the content, but worth the laugh. What makes me laugh most though is this :

Tweakers.net banner whining about adblockers

Roughly translated this means :

You are blocking our banners (unhappy face without a nose)

Hi! We see that you are probably using Adblock,Ghostery,Noscript or other software that disables our banner code. This we find regrettable, because essentially you are depriving tweakers of income that we need. Help us by white-listing Tweakers! Read more about our revenue model here.

Let me start by saying that I could not possibly care less about your revenue model or your revenue for that matter. If tweakers.net went bankrupt today, nothing of value would be lost and the internet would be a nicer place for it. It makes me happy to see that those idiots think they are worst off if certain people choose not to display tweaker ads on their computer and if their business strategy really is depending on this, then they deserve to go bust really.

It’s really simple actually. Ads generate revenue on the statistical basis that a certain number of clicked/displayed ads will get the attention of a small percentage of viewers which will result in possible higher revenue for the company in the advert. A piece of this potential value is directed back at the site which is directly proportional to the measured effect of the on-line ad-campaign.

If the effect in ad campaigns would cause a decline in sales however, the revenue for the site would also be influenced negatively. How does tweakers think that people who go out of their way to block commercial content respond to ads? On average this demographic will more often not buy a product if they had a negative advert association with it. Personally I will go out of my way to get a lesser known product intentionally if a certain on-line ad campaign irritates me.

So tweakers, you see that my blocking your banner code is actually saving your from loosing revenue as 1. I would never contribute to the subjective value that makes ads commercially value and 2. It is more likely that my reaction to adverts would negatively impact this value in the long run. You can thank me in the comments for that.

Now what could harm you revenue stream however is this stupid whining with that ad-block banner. This is because as long as mediocre sites like yours insist to confront people with your bullshit on ad revenue, I will install ad block and ghostery on every system I come across for everybody I know or work for/with. These are people who are perhaps vulnerable for ad campaigns ad would, if not for ad block software, add to the value for the company. This is revenue, the actual revenue that I am happy to deprive you of! I recommend everybody who hates ads and is technical to actively install ad-block software for people who would not by themselves do this. This is the way how we purge the mediocre content from the internet.

So my advice to tweakers and other bottom-feeder sites like is to stop your infernal, pathetic whining and either develop a real business model or shut up/go bankrupt.

ps. (If the yellow whining bar is irritating, then hiding it with ad-block element hide extensions can easily get rid of this as well!)